>>60 【【中国】村上春樹 代表作の「ノルウェイの森」はこれまでに１００万部以上が売れた。】
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BOOK REVIEW DESK Rubber Souls By JANICE P. NIMURA Published: September 24, 2000, Sunday
NORWEGIAN WOOD By Haruki Murakami. Translated by Jay Rubin. 296 pp. New York: Vintage International. Paper, $13.
''I once had a girl / Or should I say, she once had me,'' go the opening lines of ''Norwegian Wood,'' the Beatles song whose title Haruki Murakami borrowed for his 1987 novel. It happens to be a neat summary of Murakami's basic plot: boy falls for complicated girl and is changed forever. But the song, like the book, is not so easily described. An apparently simple lyric shifts upon closer reading; an oddly haunting snatch of melody repeats in the mind. ''Norwegian Wood'' is no idle choice for a title: it creates a subliminal background, both aural and symbolic, for a masterly novel of late-60's love.
Murakami has become popular in the West for a very different kind of fiction: novels like ''A Wild Sheep Chase'' and ''The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'' feature matter-of-fact narrators enmeshed in bizarre postmodern fantasias. In his native country, however, ''Norwegian Wood'' is the novel that made Murakami famous. Jay Rubin's superb translation is the first English edition authorized for publication outside Japan. (True fans may have tracked down Alfred Birnbaum's earlier translation, published for Japanese students of English.)
